Posted
by
pudgeon Tuesday June 03, 2003 @11:58PM
from the lickable dept.

Nexum writes "MacCentral has the scoop on the entire iTunes Music Store being powered by Apple Xserves. Is this the first really big implementation of Apple's server hardware? I have to admit, that even being a big Apple fan I didn't think that the Xserve hardware would be powerful enough for the severe pounding that the iTMS must have been getting. This seems like great news for Apple being able to show that they can be a real serious force in the server arena, to which they are practically a total newcomer to." I wouldn't see any reason to doubt that hardware and Mac OS X software could handle iTMS. I mean, it's heavyweight hardware, and Unix software. Still, good to see actual examples of Xserve sites in the wild.

Aren't being bought? Are you out of your mind? You know the story behind the Xserve, right?

Genentech, a biotechnology company, did some research in late 1999/early 2000 and found that BLAST, software for sequencing genetic material, could be modified to use vectors instead of scalars and get performance improvements of as much as 10X. They did some preliminary work and ran a big cluster of Power Mac G4's for a while. Then they went to Apple and said, "We want this and this, and if you build it for us we'll buy umpteen thousand of them."

Apple built it. Genentech bought umpteen thousand of them.

The net result is that every Xserve apple sells is pure profit. Genentech has already paid for the development and initial tool-up costs, and then some.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. In the late 1990's SGI designed and built a DSP coprocessor system for Lockheed. They then turned around and sold it as the Tensor Processing Unit. Of course, nobody's ever heard of those because they're very specific little devices, but it's the same basic principle.

And Apple sold about $14.6 million [midrangeserver.com] in a market of $4.47 billion. That is about 0.00326% market share, in dollars. If every one is bought [apple.com] at the current cheapest price ($2799) that is about 5216 machines sold. Not impressive numbers at all.

Keep in mind that the XServe isn't only about profit. It is also about mindshare and having a broad enough hardware selection that any company could approach Apple with a need and our favorite fruit company could turn right around and tell them, "yeah, we can do that." Clustering? Big RAID arrays? Redundancy? No problem.

Sales numbers notwithstanding, it is a competitive box. In the future it will be interesting to see how many of the things fly out of the warehouse. Time will tell, time will tell...

Of course, pedantry requires that me to point out that it is 0.00326 of the market, which is 0.326%, a hundred times larger than you calculated. A third of a percent of a huge market is not bad, especially when it's pure profit.

Aside from the fact that your math is a little off (0.326%, not 0.00326%), it seems to me that what you're saying is that Apple is doing better than most companies that introduced servers in the last few years. There are hundreds of companies that sell low to mid range 1U servers, and most of them would love to have a $14 million dollar quarter immediatly after product launch. A third of a percent of a multi-billion dollar market is not too shabby, especially compared to none of that market.

On the back, an article about companies like Microsoft and Apple that "eat their own dog food".

Though this isn't exactly news, what else would they use???

Xserves are great, I know folks (like my boss) who didn't even consider them but once they read the specs, their eyes open, their head nods up and down slowly, and their mouth says "wow, not bad. pretty good in fact"..

Given their connection to FreeBSD, they might use FreeBSD and Apache, arguing that the X-Serve is aimed as SMEs. The fact that they have enough confidence in it to use it to power something that generates this amount of traffic is a vote of confidence in their own product. Mind you, MS run some of their sites on Windows 2003 beta (presumably with multiple redundancy for the inevitable crashes).

I'd much rather run a busy ecommerce site under Zeus on a Solaris Sparc system than on Apache. Apache is the best all round web server IYAM (even cost aside), but Zeus is really quick. As for Solaris - it's not a great desktop platform (as a desktop OS, it's slower than Rain Main) but there is entirely no competition hardware wise in the high end server market.

It wouldn't be cost effective for any company other than Apple to use Xserver's in this way, I see the market as a good one for those who have alti

> It wouldn't be cost effective for any company other than Apple to use Xserver's in this way,

This is the way cost is always analyzed, and it irks me. If you have a bunch of boxes that require 10% as much administration, and 10% as much training to administrate, and cost $2000 each, compared to the other ones which cost $1500 each, then clearly the $1500 ones are less expensive.

I'm not saying that xServes DO, mind you. But your analysis of the situation is hopelessly naive... as is just about everyon

Actually, I'm including all the factors you've aluded to. I'm not being naive. I'm quoting from experience, I maintain clustered environments for a living (and I personally own x86, Sun Solaris and Apple Power PC systems to boot).

Your massively over over estimating the additional ease of use gained from using an xserve via any other Unix platform (or even Windows NT). It's easier, but there isn't much in it unless you've very little Unix experience.

I mean, Apple bashers can say all they want, but the Xserves are great machines, and the architecture proves to be scalable and reliable. Sure, they are not running at 20THz, but hell they will cope with the load of such heavy duty app like the music store.This shows Apple dedication towards *reliability*.

I dunno if I'd like to have OS X Server running on such nice boxes, but it's Apple, it works together nicely.

P.S. : I'm a switcher, that doesn't mean I only swear by Apple products. I just try to give credits to a company that clearly tried its best to come up with comprehensive solutions.

Keep in mind that the PowerPC architecture can do quite a bit more per clock tick than x86 hardware, so a 1.33 GHz PowerPC can probably perform about the same as at least a 2 GHz Pentium 4. Of course, this would vary quite a bit depending on the task at hand; only benchmarks will show the real numbers. Anyway, the PowerPC(s) in the Xserve have a good amount of raw computing power, and this will only improve as Apple moves to PPC64 chips.

They may have a problem with people installing Linux on the Xserves and then not paying for OS X Server software or upgrades; then again, their chosen market may not even consider this. Again, only time will tell.

I seriously doubt this would be an issue. Anyone who goes out of their way to get an Xserve, with the other options out there, is probably looking for the Apple hardware/OS combo. I doubt there will be very many Linux/*BSD/what have you Xserves out there. (At least not until you start seeing Xser

My guess is that unless a particular company needs a powerpc processor for a very specific reason, there's almost no way anyone would pick the Xserver over cheap commodity x86 hardware running Linux (despite the SCO clown show). The reason? Total control.

Wow. You're an idiot. You either (1) totally ignore, or (2) have no conception of the amount of shit you have to go through to get a "commodity x86 hardware running Linux" working and to keep it working. For-fuckin-get it.

Do you know what the biggest source of IT costs is? I'm talking about across the board, for every company no matter how big or small. Hint: it's not hardware, and it's not licenses. The biggest source of IT costs is SALARIES AND BENEFITS. In other words, the biggest money-suck in the IT department is PEOPLE.

So it's no surprise that people whose livelihoods depend on sweet, sweet IT salaries would advocate the use of the single most labor-intensive hardware/software combination on the planet. The more work required to get it going and keep it going, and the more arcane the knowledge required, the better for Joe Slashdotter. (I'm talking to you, "zaad.")

Meanwhile, companies large and small dream of the day they can fire their last IT guy. That's why IT outsourcing is such a growth industry, even in this down economy. If you move IT from a cap ex to an op ex, you'll help your bottom line.

Xserves require basically no setup or maintenance, unless you're doing something outside the parameters with them. If you want a file server, mail server, web server (or WebObjects server), database server, or cluster, setting up an Xserve takes about ten minutes, and maintaining it takes zero time until the hardware fails. No security issues to worry about (Software Update, baby), no arcane hardware drivers to massage into compatibility. It Just Works.

This explains why IT people hate it. It demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, just how obsolete those people are.

At worst, you'd have to develop your own custom Linux app to serve your needs. Either way, it's a lot safer than to tie my company's future to Apple.

Pffffff. This is fuckin hilarious. I love it! "Doing it my way requires extensive knowledge of obscure arcana. This is good for my job security." Hell, dude, at least you're honest.

If you think any sysadmin, software developer or manager would allow their platform to be picked on the basis that it requires a lot of people and is very expensive, you've obviously never worked in a well managed company. Profit is the motive, not hiring 30 sysadmins when 2 would do.

Just like in the automotive industry, a sysadmin or software developer needs to see the trend and move to the next viable option incrementally as to avoid their own obsolescence. I just laugh at people who say "I never thought

Businesses, especially big businesses, are extremely conservative by nature. They are generally unwilling to take risks that could lead to serious problems (how many banks are still running FORTRAN software on IBM mainframes?)

Inertia is Microsoft's greatest friend, especially if the economy remains weak. They are well-trusted name in the corporate world, and IT people kn

If you think any sysadmin, software developer or manager would allow their platform to be picked on the basis that it requires a lot of people and is very expensive, you've obviously never worked in a well managed company. Profit is the motive, not hiring 30 sysadmins when 2 would do.

It may not happen in a well-managed company, but by that metric there aren't a whole lot of well-managed companies out there. I've seen what he describes a hundred times. Often it's well-disguised, but once you cut past t

Well, you're both right. I look at dozens and dozens of IT organizations (VC) and although managers are extremely cost conscious, they also have a deeply rooted suspicion of anything that claims to automate their jobs. It's not intentional, it's just psychology: people want to believe their hard-learned skills are valuable, and will find themselves picking holes in the cheaper, automated solution in order to justify not only their job but their value. It often takes a CFO to say, "Ok, we'll do without th

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Thing is, people moderate depending on whether or not they agree with what you said. The tone with which you say it merely makes moderation more likely. Therefore it is usually worth it to go out on a limb and be assertive, even abrasive, unless you are voicing an opinion that you know is going to be unpopular on slashdot. Like one of my more recent posts, stating that all the concern over palladium is paranoia, especially since it is pure vaporware. My tone was fair

But never fear, eventually your karma gets high enough and your user account gets old enough that you can meta-moderate all the unfair moderation.

I am a rampant abuser of M2. Since moderators like to down-moderate posts that are correct or truthful but challenging to their own personal beliefs, I negatively metamoderate positive moderations of posts that are just mindless regurgitations of the Slashdot weltanshauung. Any positively moderated post that praises the FSF: unfair. Any negatively moderated pos

Would this be from the same benchmark/study that innovated by using minutes containing 100 seconds [adobe.com], among other things? Not to mention the fact that Adobe appear schizophrenic at best about their preferred OS [adobe.com]. My guess? They'll "prefer" any operating system that will bring in the greenbacks at a suitable pace.

Anyway. While we could debate the merits of PowerPC vs. x86 till our faces turned blue, I do agree with you on the assesment of the server market. Xserve will be a

We had a couple of guys from Adobe in the office recently. They both showed up lugging 12" PowerBooks.

Not a statistcal sample,just a real-life example.

Also note that the "100 second minutes" thing is due to a poorly designed graph (Adobe makes graphics software, they don't DO graphics:-). Really poorly designed, the x-axis is in decimal minutes - which I've never seen before.

How do Xserves measure up in price to comparable x86 Windows servers? I know Apple workstations (I don't want to call them PCs and get in trouble!) like PowerMacs or iMacs cost more than most Dells or Gateways, are Apple's Xserves in a similar position to Compaq, HP, etc, servers?

Sure, if you compare them to dirt cheap basic gateway and hp rubbish then they'll be more expensive, but compare them to HP and Dell's midrange stuff and they are about the same - remember that Apple starts at midrange and goes up. There is no bargain basement cheap version with Apple.

Having recently (Jan. 2002) purchased a TiBook (my first Mac ever), I did extensive price comparisons of laptops. The best choices I could find were the Sony Vaio, IBM Thinkpad, and Titanium Powerbook G4. For comparable systems, the Mac was actually cheapest. And by the way, at the time Sony didn't even make a Vaio that had all the features I was looking for.

As an aside, I've loved using my Powerbook for the past year-and-a-half, and have had minimal problems. My most recent uptime has bee

Try reparing your disk permissions. There's a lot of voodoo involved in updating the system and problems like this often occur.

Put in your Jag CD and boot holding the C key. From the CD you can repair the permissions on the System partition (which you can't do from Disk Utility when OS X is running - only on other drives/partitions).

You could also fsck the disk.

Boot in single user mode (hold command+s at boot time) and type "fsck -y" from the prompt and let it do its work. If it says it fixed errors, run

Like jo_ham said, you have to be very careful comparing Macs & Dell/Gateway/HP/etc. products. Once you spec out features to as close a level as possible, the Macs actually do come out ahead on most (not all, but definitely most) fronts.. especially with recent price slashes on the laptops and consumer lines.

As far as the XServe goes, if you break it down per-gigabyte or per-gigaflop, the prices compare very favorably. Check out the website ( http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ [apple.com] ) for the XServe RAID box for Apple's quoted comparisons if you like.

And plus, just look at all those blinkenlights!! I've seen both an XServe + XServe Raid playing an HDTV file on a 23" Cinema display, and a small rack of XServes chugging happily away on.. well, something.. and they're quite sparkly. Mmmm, blinkenlights..

The hardware is similar to Dell's, but the over all cost is cheaper because Xserve comes with unlimited Mac OS X Server licences while MS would charge a lot for that.

Another huge benifit of Xserve is that it also comes free with a world-class application server called WebObjects which NeXT used to sell for $50k! There are also lots of other nice sysadm tools such as Apple Remote Desktop. There is no way that Lintel or Wintel servers can compete with Xserve if the truth is known.

Back in 1996, Apple and Tower Records got together to try this new thing called 'e-business', where people used this other new thing, the internet, to spend money and buy things using networked computers.

Apple was only interested in selling iron, and had no interest in the retail side of things, much less selling CD's, books and video tapes.

Apple had suits as reps, and since Tower's IT department didn't even have email, the 'Pulse' magazine arm of Tower became the cheerleading squad for Russ (owner of Tower Records) and the gang.

Apple 'donated' three AIX equipped Shiners (200MHz), and Tower gathered a group to meld MUSE's song data and Tower's credit card backend into a website. www.tower.com belonged to some company back east, and they turned down a $10k offer for the domain, so www.towerrecords.com was it. A small group of highly talented software guys in the Bay Area were hired to code it all together*, and the growing pains began.

Fast forward to today, and we have ITMS on Xserve and Tower running the latest ASP shopping cart.

Like they say, it's the singer, not the song.

*That group was bought up by MS in a short time, and the e-shop app was shelved...never to be seen again. If you can't compete, kill the competition and bury the body in the backyard....but that's another thread.

apple has bad luck with join ventures like that... before AOL, apple and (is it compuserve?) were getting together to make this home internet service... apple backed out at the last minute, and shortly after the launch, this home internet system became AOL, the largest(by a HUGE margin) ISP in the world.

In the mid-eighties Steve Case was running a little company called Quantum which was an online service for the Commodore 64. By January of 1986 Q-Link had about 10,000 users. By 1987 Quantum's stock was on the decline and the company was facing an inability to pay back its loans. In '86 Steve Case moved to California for three months in an attempt to convince Apple to let Quantum build an online service for them.

Apple as you said had been running a system called AppleLink. This was a system for retailers and sales reps to keep in contact with all that was going on at Apple. The system was run by General Electric Information Services and was pretty successful at keeping its intended audience up to date. The top brass began to think an extended system might allow them to lower their customer support costs by allowing direct access to technical documentation and the like. This was the system Steve Case was in California to nab the contract for.

He managed to convince Apple to let Quantum develop and run the system. Quantum was going to produce the software and were granted the right to use Apple's logo as long as they made the program LOOK like an Apple product. Problems arose pretty quickly after a while. Quantum in Steve Case fashion wanted to package APE with new computers for free or sell it through direct marketing (mass mailing). Apple said that option was a no go, they didn't want to give software away for free. The service debuted at Apple Fest in 1988 and was $35 annually and $6 night time and $15 day time IIRC. The service had a fair number of users and was for the most part a success as far as Apple was concerned.

Quantum however decided to end their relationship with Apple. Because of the logo deal signed Apple had to pay $2.5m to Quantum to relenquish rights to use of the logo. This set Quantum up very well for the short term. In 1989 Quantum changed the name of the service from AppleLink to America Online.

Later Apple wanted to be rid of the costly AppleLink service run by GE. They decided they wanted a service not only for intracompany communication but an experience for their customers as well.

They approached AOL due to their history with APE. Apple bought the APE code from AOL to develop it further on their own with AOL providing the actual service. Apple added content from third parties and provided e-mail and other services to contend better with existing services like AOL and CompuServ. As I recall the service was announced sometime in January 1994 and went into operation around June. From the rusty confines of my mind I seem to recall the monthly fee was about $8.95 (maybe 8.99) with a couple hours included. Night time hours were $5 and daytime minutes were $8.

The service was aimed at all the people running around with Macs and Newtons and up until then relatively unused modems. NewtonMail was provided through eWorld as was e-mail for regular Macs. The interface was spacial and pretty fun to use. Any Mac enthusiast who could afford to had an eWorld account. Due to budget cuts a Windows version was never released and the service shut down altogether in 1996. Apple's problems elsewhere caused serious problems for eWorld.

I believe eWorld was the service the grandparent post was talking about. AppleLink did not get spun off from Apple however. Quantum ended their partnership and relabeled their service of their own volition. They had been playing Tandy and Apple against each other by developing similar services for both systems, the Tandy system called PC-Link. Apple was under the impression Quantum was giving their full attention to their contract when in fact they had a similar agreement with Tandy. APE failed because Apple and Quantum did not want to market the service and software the same way.

Whatever. Morons are ACs who write posts without checking the validity of their information first. At least I got the balls to use my name...your Mom knows about my balls...Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...talk about soothing!

I used to work for "Russ and the gang" in Sacto. I'm honestly suprised that they're even on the net, with all the chaos and inter-departmental fighting going on there. It took 6 months and a lot of begging/presentations just to upgrade the art dept. to 2-year old Macs. Kudos to Apple for even trying to enter that hell.

Apple's.Mac mail servers are XServes, too, running OS X Server. Apple is eating their own dogfood. Or forging the headers to make themselves look good... I don't even care as long as the mail gets through.

you would think that apple is now using much of the technology that they produce. this is the useful demonstration that companies want to see before buying the equipment. the apple.com website, the apple store, and the itunes music store are just the thing to show off the capabilities of apple products.
for example: wired, cnet, and cnn report that apple sold one million songs in the first week--sooner or later, buyer researchers learn that it was all done with xserve.

An Xserve is an _entry level_ server. It's only advantages over other 1U servers in that market segment are a) lots of internal storage (although that point is rendered mostly worthless by the lack of hardware RAID) and b) OS X. Both of which are fairly questionable outside of a narrow chunk of the market. In nearly every other way, Xserves are blown away by the competition. A similarly specced Dell 1750 (or even the superceded 1650) is thousands (AU$) cheaper, more expandable, has more and better hardw

Er, yes, but it's hardly relevant to comparing the *internal* storage capabilities of the Xserve and other 1U servers, is it ? An X-RAID works just as well plugged into a PC or Sun as it does plugged into an Xserve.

Except of course that Apple is probably using both XServe 1U kit and XServe RAID 3U kit to run the iTunes Music Store... so faulting Apple for lack of RAID when they have (and probably) use RAID for iTMS isn't really fair.

Apple designs two systems for two problems (one for compute, network, and load and one for storage, reliability, and capacity) with one OS and set of software to tie the two.

[...] so faulting Apple for lack of RAID when they have (and probably) use RAID for iTMS isn't really fair.

I wasn't faulting them for not having it for the iTMS, I was faulting them for not having it as an option for everyone else. Not everyone can afford an X-RAID (they're resonably priced for what they are, but they're still expensive).

As I said, lots of internal space is one of the only real advantages an Xserve has over the competition - but the near inability to efficiently utilise that space signif

Actually, I just had to price out the different configurations of different servers for my class, and the price difference is actually not that much. See below, they are both gathered from both company's online stores...

The XServe is definitely more expensive. However, keep in mind that the Dell comes with no operating system, while the XServe comes with OS X Server with unlimited clients (all the goodies of OS X like deployment license for WebObjects, etc.). So if you want a "GUI" server software, you would have to pony up for unlimited client version of Windows to compare (OUCH!). But if you just plan to use BSD or Linux on it, Dell is definitely cheaper.

As I said, the advantage to the Xserve is in its internal storage (more and cheaper). Take that away (as you would for, say, a compute node or a server with the local disks only used for the OS) and the price disparity quickly becomes much larger. For example, comparing an Xserve and 1750 with dual CPUs and two hard disks each and a gigabyte of RAM (a reasonable configuration for a fileserver attached to some form of network storage) and the prices are about $6300 vs $8800. Bear in mind here the 1750 als

Have you taken a Dell server with 3 or 4 drives and created a RAID 5 array? You get horrible write performance, especially for the price (hazards of using RAID 5). An Xserve with the internal software ATA RAID 1 is designed to write to both drives at the same time, so there isn't any penalty - you get write performance in the 40-45 mb/sec range. Both protect you from a single drive failure - yes, the ATA drive will likely fail earlier, but between SMAR

37.6mb/sec on your RAID 5 array on the Dell is significantly worse than the 42-45mb/sec on the ATA psuedo-software RAID on the Xserve. So having those expensive 10krpm SCSI drives does not make up for the overhead in CRC calculation in RAID 5.

You forget the other advantage of RAID5 - you only lose 1/n disks' worth of space instead of half of it.

37.6mb/sec on your RAID 5 array on the Dell is significantly worse than the 42-45mb/sec on the ATA psuedo-software RAID on the Xserve.

Where is this 42 - 45M/sec number coming from ? I hope it's something a bit more believable than marketing figures or "sponsored" comparisons.

Added to that, I'd hardly call a 10% performance difference "significantly worse". It wouldn't even be noticed outside of a benchmark. This is before even getting to the issue that most clients are reading from, not writing to, a f

I recently did some benchmarks on the Xserve RAID. Performance is quite good, but I had only limited access and I couldn't change the configuration. With a RAID 5 array of 7 drives on a single controller, I got about 92 mb/sec sustained throughput on multi-gigabyte file sizes. Remember that most I/O benchmarks I've seen are easily fooled by cache and therefore can quote some ridiculous numbers. That compares quite favorably to its competition - I get about 75mb/sec in equivalent testing on a Mylex FFX Fibre

It is absolutely blisteringly fast for sequential writes. I set up an Xserve RAID at Level 50 (2 7 disk sets and striped 'em from within Windows 2000).
I ran IOmeter from a Windows box, and saw these numbers (with 10 disk clients):
* 25,000 IOPS with a 512 byte block size
* 310 MB/sec *sustained* transfer rates for 4K blocks.
It's decent for random IO with a mix of reads and writes. But if you're gonna stream video or use it for nearline backup, DAMN it's fast.

<sarcasm>I am so shocked to hear that Apple is using their own products for their own services. I mean any "proper" company will use Linux for any and all solutions dealing with computers. Come on what were they thinking!</sarcasm>I don't think anyone should be surprised by this. Apple is not going to use PCs who is their main competitor. So their only available options are Their products (which they get as an affordable price and have easy access to support updates etc.) or IBM/Sun solution (

Just read a book about Digital, which had a note I found interesting / amusing: When Apple was a young company, they bought DEC computers for company record-keeping / infrastructure. DEC no longer exists per se, but it would be an interesting turnaround if at least some workgroup of former DEC employees at HPaq runs *their* infrastructure on an Apple server;)

Okay, if this was a farm of FreeBSD machines (a la Yahoo!), then nobody at all would be surprised...even if the machines weren't multi-CPU Xeons.

If they were other UNIX vendors' machines that had RISC CPUs at a "paltry" ~1Ghz...again, nobody would be surprised because "they're UNIX machines and more reliable and they're 'optmized' and they 'don't run a GUI'".

But because their Macs people seem surprised. That's a Mach kernel with some of the best elements of 4.4BSD and FreeBSD/NetBSD grafted on there for God's sake. Yes, it does have a very slick GUI available, but we're also talking about the SERVER VERSION of OS X.

Someone also mumbled about lack of RAID -- what's XServer RAID, then? Yes, it runs ATA drives...but look at the interesting architecture, you've got each drive on a SEPARATE controller. That, IMHO, negates a lot of issues that ATA has in one single swoop.

Anyhoo, kudos to Apple...iTunes music store seems pretty slick on many levels. And it's good to see them eating their own dog food:-)

I am surprised that people should have any doubt that Xserve and Mac OS X can handle iTMS.

Apple has been using its own hardware and software to power apple.com including Apple Online Store, QuickTime movie trailer and the.mac Web service for years now.

The QuickTime movie trailer site is the most popular on the Web, and QuickTime Player has been downloaded over 100 mln times in the last year or so. The storage and bandwidth requirement for downloading movie trailers are much higher than that for music.

To paraphrase Jobs iTMS presentation, Apple is capable of moving "ocean of bits" for video downloading, so music is really a no-brainer. In fact, a single Xerve RAID (2.5 TB) can store the 200000 songs many times over.

Apple online store is one of the best and biggest e-commerce site with annual sale in $billions.

A recent survey shows that apple.com is the #1 hardware site on the Web with 3.7 mln unique users a week, while hp.com is a distant second with 2.5 mln.

They also use WebObjects (the original enterprise application server from NeXT) for heavy lifting, which is capable of talking to multiple database systems and load ballancing. WebObjects is one of the best kept Apple secrets, and perhaps the only application server on the market that has the visual tool to automatically generate Java code for database programming.

>> Apple uses Akamai for the high-bandwidth quicktime movie trailer delivery and Speedera for other things - not sure which.

>> So Apple either doesn't have the proper infrastructure or hasn't truly found the right cost/performance ratio to handle "ocean's of bits".

Akamai has the best technology to speed up content delivery, with perhaps millions of computers distributed around the world acting as intelligent proxy servers. For instance, if a company's Web site gets lots of hits from users arou

Apple's been in the server biz for a while, it's just that they went on somewhat of a "sabbatical" because they had other priorities (i.e. staying afloat, in the late 1990's).
It was the Apple Network Server series, featuring IBM's AIX. Apple made some pretty good-looking servers for the day.
Indeed, it's great to see that Apple's made a comeback in this vital arena - all hail Mac OS X Server!

But if you don't pay the Dixie Chicks *now*, how do you expect to get paid *later*?

And what happens if you sign up with someone, and then they get carried by iTunes Music Store... what would your attitude be if I said, "Why should I be paying for Tha_Mink when I can borrow it for free?"

And as for archiving.. history and science shows us that nothing can defeat entropy, the increase in disorder and noise. The only hope is to make as many copies as possible and vainly wish that one copy somewhere, somehow,

But if you don't pay the Dixie Chicks *now*, how do you expect to get paid *later*?

I don't expect to get paid later.

And what happens if you sign up with someone, and then they get carried by iTunes Music Store... what would your attitude be if I said, "Why should I be paying for Tha_Mink when I can borrow it for free?"

I'd be saying "I don't see any reason you should..." and I'd be thinking "I don't see any reason he should..."